From now on I should only listen to those people who offer me both honesty and acceptance, or so says my horoscope for today, Tuesday the 22nd of May 2007. Sometimes it feels like I am overwhelmed with people like this, surrounded by true friends… other times it feels like I can count those honest and accepting people on one hand… or one finger, or even none at all.

As anyone who knows me or reads this blog with any regularity (and all of you who read this blog period know me, so really there’s no difference in those two groups) knows, I tend to be exuberantly, excessively passionate about the people that I choose to care about. I let people in very easily… for some reason, I still have the ability to trust, and to be sometimes painfully honest and open about my life and my feelings. In the past few months, I feel like that quality (and after much thought I have decided it’s a quality, damnit a VICTORY that I’m able to be that way), has been used, abused and torn to shreds, stomped on, shat on, pissed on and set on fire.

And yet, I continue to hope for the good in people, and the good in God, and the idea that it’ll all work out in the end if I just keep on going.

A few weeks ago, I lost someone I considered to be a friend… She sent me emails full of vitriol and anger, but I knew I’d lost her the second I started dating a boy, and right in front of her (how dare I) about a month before. She stopped talking to me, stopped confiding in me, started talking about me behind my back…and ultimately disappeared from my life completely, leaving something of a shambles behind her. I don’t care if “something of a shambles” doesn’t make grammatical sense – I rather like the sound of it.

The funny thing is, I also lost the boy I was dating who “caused” all of it. That is the one thing, however, that I don’t blame him for. Her heterophobia is not his fault (although it was his fault when he used her as an excuse to pick a fight with me because my friends didn’t like him (1 of them) when his friends hated and insulted me). The reason I ultimately lost the boy? … After dating for less than a month, I still refused to have sex with him. He needed, he said, a physical relationship (I don’t know what else you would call much of our relationship, though… basically what he wanted was the ability to stick his penis into my vagina, and I said no, I wasn’t ready.)

So, he pretended that things were okay, and told me he had no problem waiting. And then slowly stopped talking to me. He’d call me late at night only after everything else in his life had been attended to. He stopped text messaging me or returning my messages, and then got angry when I asked him why I hadn’t heard from him in days. Ultimately, after my asking him multiple times to just tell me what was going on, with no response from him, he blatantly ignored me for a week and then said he was “cutting his losses”… he was getting out because I wasn’t putting out.

That was the last I heard from him.

We were all taken in. My friends and I… people who don’t normally trust that boys are capable of being real human beings. We believed what he said, *I* believed him when he said he was crazy about me and he’d wait until I was ready. And it turned out to be an act – it turned out to be an ultimatum… either have heteronormative sex with me right now or I’m walking away.

Well of course I chose the walking away.

Call me crazy, but I think that sexual contact should mean something, and so I am wrecked over the fact that I kissed him, that I wasted kisses on him, that I believed he was who he claimed to be… and that no one warned me, not a single person. I ultimately blame myself for being taken in, and being screwed over. And knowing that no one is going to stop him from moving on to the next girl and pressuring her into sleeping with him – and in this town, it’s not hard to find a lot of girls who will. His behavior was absolutely disgusting, and I’m still in shock over it. I’m angry about it. I’m not angry at him for what he did to *me*, I’m angry that he thought he had the right to treat any human being the way he treated me. I’m angry that I met him when he assistant directed my performance of The Vagina Monologues, and so I assumed certain things, things he claimed to be true… that ultimately weren’t. He wasn’t feminist friendly. He was not an ally.

He was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and he’s going to do it again. It is all I can do not to resort to egging his car, or slashing his tires, or starting a website devoted to making sure no girl ever falls victim to his bullshit again.

Because you can’t just say you’re crazy about someone, that however and whatever they want this relationship to be, they’re in… and then utterly and completely vanish from their lives because they won’t open their legs. And you can’t do that and call yourself anything but a misogynist. You can’t do that and work in the feminist community. You can’t do that, you can’t sit in my living room and mock The Monologues or bitch about how much you hate your friends and then turn around and put them ahead of your girlfriend every single time and wonder why it is that they want to know what the hell happened to change you so drastically in such a small amount of time.

The truth was, he hadn’t changed. I’d just bought the lie, and then the mask came off. And I hadn’t been wearing one. And he’d been wearing several.

I’m able to write about this now because I’m over the “us” of it all. I’m over *him*… in fact, I wasn’t even sure I liked him enough to keep the relationship going much longer. I was still testing the waters. I was still figuring out if I could trust him. But to a certain extent, as I do with all of my friends, all of the people I spend time with, I had let him in to some small extent.

Pissed and shat all over, that was me. Twice in as many weeks. Actually twice in less than two weeks. First him, then her.

So when my horoscope says to listen only to those people who are honest and accepting, I have to wonder if my radar isn’t off. If maybe I have no clue who the people are that I know that are honest and accepting, and safe. If maybe I’ve got this whole friendship thing wrong somehow. If maybe I should just shut down. Although that means they win.

If you’re one of those honest and accepting people, feel free to say so now. If you’re not, feel free to say so as well. I’d just like to know into which baskets I should put my eggs.

I know I’m making too damned many posts in rapid succession, but Sparklepants just reminded me of Becca’s admonishment that we all make posts about her entitled “Becca is a fatty” and I would like to take this opportunity to box her about the ears for saying such a thing.

Honestly, Becca, you have a perfect body. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with you, and the fact that you actually EAT birthday cake just makes you that much more wonderful to me. I mean, who goes to a birthday party for a little kid and DOESN’T eat birthday cake? Unless they’re, you know, two seconds from puking because drinking anything MIXED with vodka makes them rather green about the gills.

When you first came over to the apartment and I met you, my thought was “this is the girl who is always insisting she has ten, or five, or three pounds to lose? WHERE exactly might she lose them from, hmm?” I think you should lose them from the basket you are carrying on your head that is packed full of all of those messages that say that normal, or beautiful, or attractive, or sexy women must be able to sleep inside of an envelope. The same goes for you, Jennifer.

In short, I would just like to say that there was not a single fatty present at Eli’s birthday party yesterday, and if I ever hear you use that word, or any other term in a derogatory fashion against yourself, I will beat you over the head with a brick.

Got it? Got it. Good.

Your neighborhood feminist police

Currently Reading

Eve Ensler, Insecure At Last

Brettell and Sargent, eds. Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective

Quoth the Raven:

"Girls aren't beautiful, they're pretty. Beautiful is too heavy a word to assign to a girl. Women are beautiful because their faces show that they know, that they have lost something and picked up something else."